


Find Me When The Bells Are Tolling, Snow Is Falling

by hitlikehammers



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-29
Updated: 2010-12-29
Packaged: 2017-11-01 02:49:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/351110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every Christmas, they come back to Godric's Hollow. For <a href="http://lenina20.livejournal.com/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://lenina20.livejournal.com/"><b>lenina20</b></a>, who requested <i>"Harry/Hermione - canon!complaint, angsty affair!fic"</i>. <b>Spoilers for <i>Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows</i> (2007 Book and 2010 Film).</b></p>
            </blockquote>





	Find Me When The Bells Are Tolling, Snow Is Falling

**Author's Note:**

> I have to admit: I never really shipped these two, until very recently. It wasn’t that I _disliked_ them together, I just... didn’t think much about it, and wasn’t actively interested in them. So coming up with a plot for this took me a bit -- but then I saw the film, and this is what came about of the ideas that struck. It's not all that coherent, or linear, but I do hope it’s not too horrible :)

This place is steeped in memory; they come to lose themselves inside.

She draws the wreath, an offering, as always: so green it’s almost black, so black it almost fits, and he doesn’t appreciate it anymore for anyone else, any _thing_ else apart from what it begins for them, what it signals the start of: a safety, a release for barely a moment, only a night.

 _It’s cold_ , she whispers, breathes warm against his neck, melts the snowflakes that have settled on his skin as she waits for him to lead; but he knows what she’s after, knows what she’s trying to do.

She wants _him_ to move first, to take the fall for how they are, what they do; she wants to have a thin excuse to keep away the chill, but it’s foolish, folly; it’s all for show.

It’s shameful, but they are not ashamed.

 _After you_ , he turns, exhales just above her upper lip, and she turns sharp eyes against him, like they haven’t danced this way enough to know exactly how the chips will fall, exactly whose footsteps follow whose in the snow.

She sighs, and she walks away, kneels in the snow until she shivers, traces his mother’s name in the stone -- he places a hand at the nape of her neck and waits until she’s ready, mourning for the kinds of things that words can’t fit, and he draws her close when they step together, walk as one down a two-way street they’ve paved for themselves, year by waning year in the dark.

They’re both to blame for this.

__________

 

The first time, they don’t mean to.

He’s standing there, watching the snow fall and feeling like all the white’s a lie; he sees her, shivering, and he holds her close against his chest, makes a heat between them that’s honest, long overdue.

A clock strikes twelves somewhere, and he kisses the top of her head; it’s the first thing that’s felt right since before he can remember, than before he cares to recall.

The first time, it happens because there’s nothing else left, nowhere else to go, and no one else who understands.

Just them.

__________

 

They don’t leave names, they are faceless -- charms and tricks of the light, they’ve learned how to escape attention, and sometimes he wonders how things might have been, had he been a boy with parents, had she been a witch by blood. If the walls hadn’t crashed around them. If they’d both lived and died in a different sort of world.

His joints creak as they climb the stairs to their room -- the same room, every time; they used to be anxious, used to steal kisses and touches, brushes and fumbles beneath their cloaks before they ever stopped safe behind closed doors; but there’s no hurry, now -- not anymore.

The minutes, the years spiral on too fast; they’re allowed to savor these, feel them full before they’re gone.

__________

 

The second time, they don’t plan it.

His eyes widen when he sees her, the tear tracks on her face nearly crystallizing in the chill; they’ll mourn forever like this, only allowing themselves this one night in which to grieve; this one night, inside each other.

He kisses her, runs lips up the salt lines on her cheeks, and she falls against him, her breath a cloud against the cold. He holds her, and leads her to the inn; he doesn’t know what will happen, but he knows -- a foggy memory -- how to hope.

__________

 

She takes off her scarf, unwinds it from her neck with slow twirls, careful motions as he unlatches his cloak, slips off his robes -- they don’t watch one another, almost shy.

Almost, until she’s firelit against the darkness, and he’s tall and scared across the room, and they meet on a bed too small to fit their sins, frantic and roaming and wild and wrong, mouths and hands and heat where their hearts pound close together, where he drowns in her scent and she licks at his chin; where she teases the length of him and he buries his face in the home, the haven of her chest.

If he cries against her, if she does the same -- they don’t speak of it; it doesn’t warrant noting.

They are here, and it’s enough.

__________

 

At the end, in the middle: they walk in separate directions, think hard about where they’re going as they turn on their heels and disappear against the falling snow.

The apparate side by side outside of the Burrow; Hermione blames the flush of her cheeks on the Australian sun when Ron asks -- he hugs her close, knows she misses having her family near; the distance there is more than just of land and sea, after everything.

Ginny raises an eyebrow at the red of her own boyfriend’s skin, and Harry mutters, _Just the cold_ \-- she knows where he’s been, and doesn’t press, never asks to come with him: she understands that he has to pay his respects alone.

He smells Molly’s cooking and feels his stomach clench as he’s led to the table; his fingers are folded against Ginny’s palm, his eyes follow Hermione’s fingers where they dance at Ron’s wrists.

__________

 

There’s not enough air in the room, not enough space in the world -- they need to be closer and the universe won’t let them: all he wants is to sink inside of her and never leave; to get lost, so that he’ll never remember a pull to be anywhere else.

He looks at her, longing as he lets the pace turn quick, coaxes her to moan deeper and tremble faster, fuller, and she’s looking back at him with a desperate ache in her eyes, and by the moon, the stars, by everything that has survived, everything that endures and remains: he _wants_ her.

 _I’m pregnant_ , she whispers, and he feels his breaths stutter as her tears slip out, silent.

He comes hard, spills inside of her, and waits for his heart to stop racing.

It doesn’t.

__________

 

 _Do you think he knows_? His lips slide down between her breasts and he mouths the warm skin, tacky with friction and sweat.

Her fingers twine in his hair as he breathes her in; as she sighs, and he can feel it in her chest. _I wonder_ , she says softly, exhales it low like it might float away, like she can purge it slowly from her soul if she wills it deep enough; _sometimes_.

 _Ginny?_ She asks the same, her fingertips stroking, idle at his hairline, his temples; he moans, and licks at her nipple, tongues the taunt skins that buds tight under his ministrations.

 _I try not to think about it_ , he says between breathes as she cants her hips into him, catches him hot between her legs at the stomach, her thigh dragging the length of his hardening shaft between the sheets.

 _Do you ever regret not just... staying?_ He asks it, breathless; like it was someone else who told her no, who walked away from what might have been the only chance for his world to know brightness, for his soul to know rest. _Growing old?_

 _Every day_ , she heaves a breath when his fingers tease her opening, trace her heat, when his lips settle soft above the fluttering of her heart. _Not for long_ , she whispers, tugs at his hair when he grinds against her; _But,_ and she sighs when he strokes her, slick as he kisses up her clavicle, measures her pulse in his mouth.

_Every day._

__________

 

 _Mmm_ , she groans as he sucks at her breasts, lifts up to sink inside her; _We shouldn’t._

And it’s what she always says, what one day, he thinks, maybe she’ll move beyond -- it’s pointless, useless; it changes nothing.

Stops nothing.

 _The children_ , she murmurs into the crook of his neck as he rocks into her, cups beneath her thighs and lifts her to him; _They’ll be up soon._

She’s gasping, hard against him, her heartbeat like music, an endless hum against his lips where he’s panting at her throat

He lets his fingertips lilt down her sides; looser skin, after she gave birth, little lines where she’d stretched and grown around new life -- he remembers kissing over the swell of her stomach with Hugo, how beautiful, how wicked and perfect and true it had felt when she trembled with the way he breathed against her; remembers the guilt like lead in his gut, hard in his chest when he compared it to Gin, thought of them _both_ inside moments that should never have existed at all.

__________

 

His pulse is still thrumming; he’s late, and he tries to avoid catching himself -- flushed and fucked out, pupils blown with insatiable fire -- in the mirror across the room as he gathers his things, tries to imagine any possible world where Ginny won’t suspect him, any way she won’t see through the lies he’s been feeding her from the very start, that she’s only swallowed down because of love.

He sucks in a shaky breath, and tries not to picture his world caving in.

Her hand is on his shoulder and he turns, desperate -- chest heaving as she slides her hand and rests it, cold and sure over his heart, and he lets her calm him, lets her be there, where others cannot be; where he won’t let them touch.

He closes his eyes and feels the weight of her palm replaced by something solid, small.

 _Don’t lose this_ , she breathes against his neck, and it feels too heavy, too full.

He holds the object close at hand, recognizes it immediately -- recalls a night where lives were saved that didn’t matter, in the end, and he wishes those hours could have been spent somewhere else, somewhere that hurt less, when all was said and done; he wonders how it came to be like this, before she reaches up and turns his pendant, watches him fade as she tips her own in kind.

__________

 

She dresses; he sits, eyes on her, soaking up the last of this, praying as he always does that it will sustain him, hold him over in the space between.

They’ve learned not to waste breath on the things that don’t matter, not to toss words around as if they’re anything but sacred -- they don’t speak before she turns, before he sighs and stands and readies himself to return to everything he knows, and wants -- he _does_ : he wants, and loves, and cherishes the world he knows beyond this, that he lives each day; but his soul is here, he’s realized, and it’s a trial to endure the breadth of life, bereft.

It’s a trial, and he’s a weak, tainted man.

They don’t say goodbye.


End file.
